1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for efficiently representing a user's location and path within a web site or application.
2. Description of the Prior Art and Related Information
In Grimm's fairytales, Hansel used crumbled up pieces of bread to mark his trail as his evil stepmother led him and his sister Gretel deep into the dark forest. Modern Web design techniques use Hansel's (ultimately ill-fated) ruse as a metaphor to allow the user to view their path through a Web application in a backward linear manner. Commonly called a breadcrumb trail or navigational breadcrumbs, this technique is a visual representation to the user of where and how information is situated within a Web application. The breadcrumb trail helps users to understand and learn the application structure. For example, the breadcrumb path for an online store may take the general form: Store Name>Catalog Name>Item Name. This visual device shows the user the pages they have previously viewed to get to their currently displayed page. The location of the navigational path is often prominently placed in the upper left quarter of the web page. While a breadcrumb path is a convenient Web orientation and navigation device, existing breadcrumb models suffer from problems relating to efficiency and scalability, among other issues.
Indeed, the use of breadcrumbs in iterative searches and composite objects (Purchase Orders, Requisitions, etc.) results in a number of inefficiencies. For example, it is very common for users to conduct multiple searches and repetitively refine their search conditions. Usually, web catalogs search results are displayed either in a separate page from the search facilities, or on the same page. In both cases, depending on implementation, each new search results page will either dismiss the previous breadcrumb link to a previous search results page, or append another link onto the existing breadcrumb trail. The former leads to loosing the previous search results (that users may eventually want to return to) while the latter grows the breadcrumb trail indefinitely. The same applies to viewing/updating information in composite objects with multiple attributes or line items. A Purchase Order with multiple line items is an example of such a composite object. As the user sequentially views the line items and returns to the Purchase Order object, the breadcrumbs to already viewed/updated line items of the object may be dismissed or the breadcrumb trail becomes unmanageably long as the trail details each line item and each recurring page view of the Purchase Order in turn.
When a conventional breadcrumb path is used in Web based applications having even a moderately complex structure, the number of individual links in the trail quickly grows to unmanageable size as users click through the application. As can be readily understood, this may lead to a non-insignificant loss of the primary substantive real-estate of the web page that should be allocated for the data display, as shown at 106 in FIG. 1. For example, a conventional breadcrumb path for a user shopping online for a digital camera may look like: Procurement Home>iProcurement>Stores>Countries>Stores: United States>Beast Buy®>Products>Electronics>Cameras>Brands>Russian>Zenit Models: 2004>Digital Cameras>6 Megapixel Cameras>Search: Red Eye Reduction>Zenit-680MS, as shown at reference numeral 104. This breadcrumb path also assumes that the user headed straight for the desired page without first shopping around, with any error and without backing out of undesired pages. Had the user not headed straight to his or her ultimate destination, the breadcrumb trail would be much longer and take up a significantly greater portion of the browser. Moreover, if the titles of the Web pages visited are longer and more descriptive, the disadvantages of such a conventional the breadcrumb trail are further exacerbated.
From the foregoing, it may be appreciated that improved site navigation techniques, tools and methods are needed.